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'Circle Mirror Transformation' review or 'Anyone for a game of spilikins?'

‘Circle Mirror Transformation’, Annie Baker

Rose Lipman Building (Theatre Local season)

Written for Culture Wars

Five people lie on the floor
of a studio, counting up to ten. The scattered bodies look like spilikins,
randomly distributed yet crucially interlinked. These five people are playing a
drama game, in which they must count to ten without speaking over each other.
The silences between the spoken numbers throb with meaning; they are filled
with anxiety, hope, frustration and a deep desire to access each other’s inner
thoughts.

It’s a cracking scene – one
that fizzes with energy and immediacy and all sorts of subtle revelations about
the characters involved. Annie Barker’s compelling play, which plays with and
prowls around reality, is packed with similar drama games. It’s set in the
summertime in Vermont, where five characters – including teacher Marty (Imelda
Staunton; smart, sparky and so reachable) - have gathered for a drama course. All
the characters are a little lost and hoping to escape their lives for a while.
This play is about what they find whilst they’re looking in the opposite
direction.

Staunton could’ve easily
slipped into caricature, as the ex-hippy drama teacher who just wants everyone
to be happy – but her performance, though superficially funny, is so rich that
one can see the child her character once was, the old lady she will eventually
become. Staunton sets the tone of this piece and it is one of strained optimism
and pooling panic. There’s a wistfulness to her character, which suggests that
a part of her that is always absent, preoccupied with secret concerns.

Initially, the drama games are
light-hearted and very silly. The students walk around the room, responding to
Marty’s commands. ‘Start noticing everyone around you!, says Marty, and
everyone stops, looks and stares. At the moment, they are only observing on a superficial
level.

With just a few classy touches,
director James Macdonald embellishes the play’s embedded themes. The production takes place in a community
centre in Haggerston, so the lighting is crude. Macdonald embraces this limitation
and transforms the necessary snap blackouts into a sixth characters in the
room. A drama exercise ends badly and Marty peps up the group, ‘Try again!’ The
light snaps shut, encouraging us to laugh. But as the drama exercises build in
intensity, the black outs begin to feel a tad malicious; they are the doubts in
these characters heads, dreams dying and youth vanishing.

Macdonald also lights up the door
to the studio, before the scenes begin. The modest little gym, stripped bare
except for a hula hoop and exercise ball, glows red with the light of the Exit
sign. It is a neat little touch, which hints at the escape that all these characters
are looking for.

Recently divorced chap,
Schultz (Toby Jones – so focused that he basically glows) is asked to do an
exercise with Theresa (Fenella Woolgar), with whom he has had a brief fling.
The couple must repeat two lines: ‘I need you to stay/Well, I want to go.’ This
might sound horrifically forced, but the simplicity and emotional honestly of
it all stops the device from feeling too manufactured. The intensity that Jones
pours into just one line – I need you to stay – is frightening and horribly
sad.

All the drama games begin to
shimmer with double, triple truths. Baker sets up the most potent of role play
exercises and dares the truth to wriggle free. Marty and her straying husband,
James (Danny Webb), mimic young student Lauren’s parents and little flickers of
their own anger spark up. James and Theresa share a conversation in gobbledy
gook and a not-so–secret heat flares up between them. Marty recites a monologue
about Lauren’s life and the missing mother figure, which Lauren (Shannon
Tarbet) so palpably desires, hovers about the gym.

The games also play with the
idea of memory and lost time. At one point, Schultz tries to get the actors to
represent his childhood bedroom. Theresa waves about like a maple tree, James
pretends to be the bed and Marty curls up like a cuddly toy. The end result is absurd.
‘That doesn’t really look like my bedroom’, Schultz quietly objects. It is such
a sad moment, filled with the certainty of life passing. Things move on and
there is nothing – no game and no imagination in the world – that will get
those moments back again.

The ideas and people and love
that we lose as time passes is like a sad scent that clings – very faintly – to
Baker’s play. Sometimes that transience is comforting – at other times, deeply
depressing. Drama sits awkwardly and intriguingly in between this comfort and
sorrow. Acting is, after all, an attempt to capture what has long since passed;
an effort to identify life and hold it aloft. As Baker beautifully reveals in
an aching final scene, drama is something we take part in every day, whether we
realise it or not; ‘I don’t know. I guess I feel like my life is pretty real.’